I walked on by. I like to believe that I move with the times, but sometimes even I miss the 1890s.

An antique shop was tucked into the base of a great white mansion with a brass-plated door facing a square decked with a fountain of gurgling dolphins and raging ocean gods. When I pushed open the door, a small brass bell rang, and the air within smelt of old paper, feathers, copper and clay. A pair of Chinese tourists–never going to buy–stood examining a little marble statue bearing the face of a stern-eyed bishop with a sagging chin, but at my approach they giggled and put it down, like children caught fiddling with the keyhole in a vending machine. A man, his hair inclining towards grey, forest-green trousers faded to thin patches around the knees, stumbled out from behind a counter bedecked with skulls, pots, papers and the obligatory models of St Stephen’s spire, looked at me and stopped where he stood. “I told you already,” he blurted. “Go away!”

For a moment I forgot my body, and blushed, hot and suddenly ashamed. “Klemens,” I blurted. “I’m Romy.”

His hands, which had been flapping in the air, as if by wafting alone I could be propelled through the door, froze. His face tightened, lips peeling back. “You shit,” he spat, the thickness of his accent tying up around the word and making it greater. “I have nothing to say, and you come here like—”

“I’m Romy,” I repeated, stepping forward. “We went to the opera together, rode the Ferris wheel. You like green beans but hate broccoli. I’m Romy. I’m Di’u. I’m me.”

Chapter 34

Klemens and Romy Ebner.

They appear approximately one third of the way through the Kepler file.

They met in 1982 at a dinner in Vienna and were married five months later. She was Catholic, he was lapsed, but the service was before the eyes of God, and their dedication was absolute.

Their first child was born in 1984, and sent to boarding school at fourteen, to return to the family home no more than twice a year. Klemens loved walking in the forested hills that bounded Vienna; Romy did not, and so the walking boots stayed at home and he looked at the horizon from the windows of the Bruner-strasse tram on his way to work.

When he joined a choir, she said he sang like a chipmunk. When she started attending meetings at the local church hall, he enrolled in a cooking course, but his food, she said, was foreign muck and she had no time for it. When she retired, to dedicate herself to herself, he stayed working, longer and later to support their needs, and found that, alone in the evening gloom of the shop, he did not mind his own company.

When I met them, I was Trinh Di’u Ma, trafficked from her home aged just thirteen years old, whose parents, some five years later, had paid an estate agent to find her and bring her back. They had no money to give, so they bartered away the only currency they could think of–six months of their daughter’s body, in exchange for her safe return home. I had taken the deal and regretted it, for on acquiring Trinh from the brothel in Linz, I spent the best part of a month engaged in nothing but medical tests and detox. When the pain grew too great, I jumped from Di’u into the body of the nurse who watched her, and sat with my head in my hands as she screamed for heroin, please God, please, just give me what I need, I’ll do anything.

Even when the last opiate had been flushed from her system, and I walked wobbling from the hospital door, I felt the emptiness in her mind, longing in her blood, and wondered whether I, riding the mere echo of dependence, could make it to Vietnam without breaking.

Sitting in the departure lounge of Vienna airport, my arms around my knees, a fake passport in my pocket and caffeine buzzing around my head, I felt the avoidance of the well-dressed travellers more than the stares of the security guards. When the customs officers, having no better reason than my age, race and fading scars, took me to one side and strip-searched me, their hands running over every part of my body, their machines beeping at my bare goosebumped flesh, I stood with arms open and legs apart and said nothing, felt nothing but an overwhelming desire to get out.

I nearly left her then, abandoning Di’u with her ticket for Hanoi and no recollection of how she got there, until a man, seeing me hunched beneath the seats, came up to me and said in badly broken English:

“Are you OK?”

Klemens Ebner, in a yellow jumper and appalling beige trousers, knelt by the side of a shaking Vietnamese girl and said, “Miss? Ma’am? Are you OK?”

Behind him, Romy Ebner, stiff-backed in black and blue, exclaimed, “Get away from her, Klem!”

I looked up through Trinh Di’u Ma’s hazy eyes into the eyes of the only man in the world who seemed to care, and he was beautiful, and I was in love.

Two weeks later I knocked on a heavy black apartment door in Vienna, wearing the smart sandals and well-worked feet of the local postman, and said, “Delivery, please?”

Romy Ebner answered it, and as she signed the packet and returned my pen, I caught her by the wrist and jumped.

Chapter 35

Back in the body of Nathan Coyle, I sat in the darkest corner of the tightest café in Vienna and ate lemon cake with a cherry on top while Klemens gripped his tiny cup of coffee and failed in his mission not to stare.

“How did you end up as him?” he asked, voice low against the customers coming in for lunch. “As this man?”

His crinkled eyes were enough to suggest dislike, his voice confirmed active hate. I shrugged, scooping purple cake on to the end of my fork, and tried not to take it personally. “He came looking for me,” I replied. “I take it you’ve met him before?”

“He came to the shop, asking about you,” he grumbled, sipping espresso a droplet at a time. “Not in terms of a name, or a description of your… your qualities. He knew my wife had had blackouts, a few days here, a few days there, and wanted to know if I had experienced the same.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said no.”

“What did you tell him about your wife?”

Klemens smiled, and immediately frowned, joy and guilt taking turns to wash across his features. “I told him that my wife seemed absolutely fine, and then said she couldn’t remember what she’d done yesterday. I told him that we’d been to the doctor a few times, but he couldn’t find anything wrong with her, and that I wasn’t very worried about it.”

“And was he… I mean, was I,” I grunted, “happy with this reply?”

“You were… neutral. Your partner seemed unconvinced.”

“Ah, my partner. Alice?”

“That was the name she gave.”

“What’s she like?”

He blew thin steam off the top of his coffee and considered. “She spoke German with a Berlin accent, liked to be in charge, walked around like a man, very tough, very proud. She was on her phone a lot, made notes, took a few photographs–I asked her not to–she had short blonde hair. She wanted to be tougher than anyone else in the room. I thought it weakened her, trying to be all that.”

“Are the two mutually incompatible? Femininity and toughness?” I asked, and to my surprise and secret pleasure, Klemens blushed. He had a good blush, which swelled up beneath his neck and circled round the rim of his ears.

“No,” he mumbled. “Not at all… Just I thought she was maybe trying too hard to be… something she didn’t have to be.”

I grinned and had to resist the urge to put my hand on his. His eyes met mine, then looked away, down into the blackness of his coffee cup. “She left me a card. An email address, contact number. Would it help you?”